Time is Tacita Dean’s Material

Two orange projections of a marble sphinx creep along the wall. Six circular holes appear on its surface, each containing a different moving world: in one, an ant shifts dirt around; in another, desserts – jellies, jam sponges and Christmas cake. The sphinx is static, while the puddings and insect move, clearly on celluloid film. Then, the images change to a postcard of a cascade of water gushing down a rock face. It has a single, large circular perforation, inside of which a tree shakes in a breeze with a swathe of black fabric snagged on its branches. 

Tacita Dean’s latest film, Geography Biography (2023), is a technical marvel containing two synthesized 35mm projectors mounted on a spinning platform. Together, they emit sister images – as the title suggests – from Dean’s life and career, including 16mm outtakes from her ongoing portraits of older artists, such as Claes Oldenburg (Manhattan Mouse Museum, 2011) and David Hockney (Portraits, 2016). Almost all the backgrounds (ancient statues, plant life, landscapes etc.) are portrait-orientated postcards collected by Dean on her travels, and the accompanying catalogue is a guide to their origins: the sphinx, we learn, is, in fact, a keepsake from New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. 

Dean’s film is at the heart of an eponymous exhibition in a broader museum programme, ‘Before the Storm’, which invites artists to respond to the cataclysmic impact of climate change. In turn, the works here suggest our shared frailty unites us: the affliction of decay a process that the planet experiences in accelerated form at our own hands.

‘Geography Biography’ is a sophisticated collage of Dean’s life in film, in which time collapses and unexpected juxtapositions abound: Niagara Falls, its waters frozen in sheer white stalactites, serves as the backdrop to footage of French mime artist Marcel Marceau (the only non-original film here), while Dean herself, aged 26 in Liberty and Marmite (1991), appears inside a delicate collotype postcard of an amber iris from 1906. Audiences must shimmy around a circular bench surrounding the projection mount to follow the kaleidoscopic pictures like the arms of an elaborate clock. Indeed, time, it seems, is the artist’s most persistent material.

Dean’s starting point for the show was a colonialist mural, Panorama of Commerce (1889), bordering the dome of the Bourse de Commerce. The work of five artists, it depicts the progression of modernity in France through international trade. The artist took the changing seasons subtly depicted in the fresco as the lead for a series of multimedia works, although the mural ultimately becomes a somewhat arbitrary – and underserving – anchor.

In Sakura Study (Taki I) (2022), a photographic print with white pencil, Dean evokes a commonality between human bodies and the limbs and wooden supports of an ailing Japanese cherry blossom tree, a species whose spring bloom has shifted over millennia due to warming temperatures. Whereas in The Wreck of Hope (2022), a vast unfixed chalk drawing on black boards constructed in panels, she renders a fragile and disappearing glacier, scrawling stream-of-consciousness notes across its surface. The glacier, which took thousands of years to form, is melting before our eyes in mere decades.

‘Geography Biography’ (albeit a cliché title) delights in the play of inversions: postcards, historically used for informal messages, become vehicles of deep memory. The technical mastery at play here is phenomenal: creating a smooth reel of 35mm film from static and moving information – 19th-century postcards and Super 8 reels alike – is a laborious act involving re-photographing and re-filming. But the composite is more than a mechanical exercise, and what emerges most vividly is a rich and fragmented life that relishes in the material of its presentation.

Tacita Dean’s ‘Geography Biography’ is at Bourse de Commerce, Paris, until 11 September

^{Main image: Tacita Dean, ‘Geography Biography’, 2023, installation view. Courtesy: the artist, Pinault Collection, Paris, Frith Street Gallery, London, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, Paris and Los Angeles}